


Atmosphere

by Stakebait



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-26
Updated: 2010-05-26
Packaged: 2017-10-09 17:53:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stakebait/pseuds/Stakebait





	Atmosphere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flowery_twat](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=flowery_twat).



  
_Jesus died, for somebody's sins, but not mine, not mine  
Jesus died, for somebody's sins, but not mine_

The club was dark, full of red light and black clothing and a deep, unsubtle thumping rhythm that caught at your heartbeat and forced it into line. Down in the meatpacking district, it was dangerous in that contrived way that turning up the lights at last call would be enough to destroy.

Kind of like Ethan, these days: too many laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, too many translucent veins in his wrist, below parchment dry skin. He did best in the half-dark: his flashing smiles had only gotten better with twenty years of practice, if he did say so himself, his fingers only defter at uncoupling buttons and sliding where they absolutely shouldn't be, where they belonged.

He bought drinks, or cadged them, according to what and who he fancied, and told jokes that were a bit more than a bit cruel. They couldn't say they hadn't been warned. Or if they did, he wouldn't be hanging about to hear it. Morning light was so harsh on the complexion. Sunnydale had taught him something after all: these days, Ethan made a fetish of being gone before the lights came up.

There was a girl on the dance floor he fancied. Making a black leather on black leather fashion statement didn't precisely stand out in this crowd, but she moved like a dream of vengeance, all look and no touch, all sex and no love, all heat and no light.

Ethan approved. Most especially because there was a man she was scrupulously not looking at. He stood in the corner and drank martinis and ached with jealousy and pain and confusion. Ethan could smell it coming off him in waves. He was good looking: Tall, cut, dark skin and shaped jaw. Authority figure type, ordering drinks without bothering to look at the bartender, like they'd come when he called them. A little better dressed than his date, if the truth be told.

This wasn't his kind of scene, a little too cheap and a little too young, and he was making that clear with his stance, GQing the jacket over his shoulder like he was about to turn on his heel and leave at any moment. But he wouldn't, not till she did, Ethan could see that at a glance. Wouldn't leave, wouldn't dance, couldn't take her and couldn't leave her alone.

Ethan murmured to the waitress and then began weaving his way through the dancers. There was no way to make it look accidental, not with the crowd surrounding her. Ethan went one better, he made it look graceful, insinuated himself so that two poor foolish boys were left appearing to dance with each other, the cardinal sin among repressed American youth. Ethan smiled. Another time, another mood, he might have shown them what they were missing.

Instead he danced with the girl. Or more accurately, danced at her as she danced at the poor outclassed fools around her. He was acting instead of reacting, drawing on years of punk and glam and even, at a low point in recent history, goth, anyplace where a slender man with ambiguous eyes and catholic tastes might parlay sinuous hips and bitten lips into something half-resembling a welcome.

"Aren't you a little old for me, grandpa?" she asked him.

Ethan smiled, easy in his own skin. "I'm a chickenhawk."

It startled a laugh out of her. His instincts had guided him to the right thing to say, something they did nearly as often as they led to the exact wrong one. The sheer ridiculousness of it formed a bond between them. She could never be prey, and she knew he wasn't stupid enough not to know it.

She shut down all the harder to make up for the second of letting him see the genuine humor in her eyes. Stared past his shoulder, sullen and smoldering, singing along with the music which was ostentatiously more interesting than he. Some idiot started grinding up against her arse and she allowed it. Putting Ethan in his place, she was, but he just grinned. "Who died for your sins, then?"

"Don't remember his name." She brushed past him, suddenly all business. Ooh, touched a nerve there. This could be entertaining. Ethan made a grab for her arm, more for the unsettling heat of skin on skin than anything as crude as force, but she twisted his arm sharp and fierce and far too strong for her size, jamming it up behind his back.

Ethan laughed into the pain, moving his hips back into hers. He can play this way too, not what he had in mind but there's nothing so delightful as surprises.

He whispered something too soft to hear, forcing her to lean in to yell "What?" over the throbbing baseline, hating herself and him just a little bit more.

"Your friend is watching." Ethan saw the wince as the waitress delivered the drink, with his compliments. He turned his head just that crucial inch and licked her throat.

"I could break you," the girl said conversationally. And then his arm was free, shoulder limp and burning, and she was snaking through the crowd almost too fast for him to follow.

"C'mon," she said without looking over her shoulder, and Ethan followed out of the club and into a cloud of smoke – poor exiles huddled between velvet ropes, sheep clustered for comfort inside the merest idea of a wall – and then the cold clean air of the street. Ethan started looking for a taxi but it abruptly ceased to matter: there was an alley, there was a brick wall hitting his back, and then she was on her knees on the cobblestones.

Not the way he'd thought she was going to play this, not at all, but there were wine dark lips wrapped around his cock and surely it's every good Chaos worshipper's duty to embrace such unexpected changes of plans? A lurking figure in the alley's mouth half-shielded them from the street. Her – lover, husband, bodyguard? - was watching impassively, with only the tiniest pulsing where his jaw met his cheek.

She was good at this, practiced, clutching her own tits like a porn actress, grinding her hips into nothing. Ethan couldn't see the bloke's eyes for backlit shadow, or hers for a tangle of dark hair. But there was wet warmth and cool air, tongue rough and teeth gentle, and suction just maddeningly short of pain.

Ethan trembled on the edge of orgasm, groaning with frustration, hoarding it up to fuel – something: Magic, music, the next night's hunting. "Let me –" his fingers tangled in her hair, trying to guide her up to where he could reach to touch, but she just threw her head back and laughed.

"That's not what you're for," she told him, and Ethan wondered what the hell he was for, then. She turned around, leather pants tugged down just enough, pulled tight across her thighs. On her hands and knees in the dirty street and it didn't take a genius to know what was expected of him.

She was more tight than wet and her nipples were hard like pearls between his twisting fingers. Her chin was up, locking gazes with the shadow where her shadow's face should be, and the whole time Ethan took her she didn't look away. He pulled out and came on the sidewalk, part caution and part insult, and she was up before Ethan, fastening her clothes.

"We should go, Faith," the man observed evenly, as if the two of them were alone.

Faith – what a wonderful name, it made Ethan itch to break her for the sheer play on words of it – gave Ethan the barest minimum of a mumbled "it's been real," and looked surprised to have done that much.

Ethan would have blown her a sarcastic kiss but he was already moving. His hand closed around the strange man's cock. "How does it feel," Ethan hissed in his ear, "to know you'll never be enough?" He gave a good firm stroke, to cement the association between humiliation and sex, but from the feel of things his assistance wasn't needed.

Unexpectedly, the man smiled. "Like home," he said, and lifted Ethan's hand off his raging erection as patiently as a man correcting a student. He put his jacket around Faith's bare shoulders, and the two of them walked away round the corner.

Ethan re-entered the club. It was only half past midnight. No sense in wasting the indignity of having a cartoon devil stamped upon his hand. Of course, by tomorrow he had best be long gone, before everyone else who wore one found the promptings of their baser nature just a little harder to ignore. Ethan hadn't bothered to exempt himself from the effects of the spell: he was the best of friends with the devil on his shoulder. But he didn't have to go just yet. There were disappointed young men to be consoled, after all, and hours left till dawn.


End file.
